The Red Queen’s Guide to Productivity

I like reading productivity sites.  There, I’ve said it.

It seems to me, though, that the things almost always suffer from one of two basic fallacies: either they assume that you would be fine if you could somehow work harder; or they assume that you would be fine if you just managed to decouple yourself from the rush of the world around you. One Guru I can think of seems to fall into both camps, even.

Today two things occurred to me.  The first is remembering what all this reminded me of: a scene in Looking Glass.

Reblogging as a Replacement For Comments

<rant>
This nonsense has gone on for long enough.

It’s fine to say that blogging a response to someone else’s post is a good way to comment on it, but to say that it should actually replace comments — as many people, including Marco, do — is simply a failure to think logically.

It. Doesn’t. Work.

Ultimate Fashion Sense!

From A Fistful of Sky, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman:

It slammed into me, and I screamed, the impact was so unexpected!  But it didn’t hurt.  First there was heat, then a wave of flickery tingling, the sort of a champagne-bubbles-in-my-brain feeling.  I blinked a couple of times and stared at my sister.

“No, no, no,” I said.

Her hand dropped to her side.  “Ultimate Fashion Sense? What kind of curse is that?”

Followers Scraping

For what it’s worth I thought I’d post the ruby script that lets me scrape my followers from Tumblr. Of course, you can get the tumblrs you are following considerably more easily, since there are formatting tags for that, but for some reason unknown to man I wanted to list all the people that are following me, rather than the other way around. (Perhaps because I’m astonished and grateful that anyone would want to do so; perhaps because I’m just awkward.)

Stun Gun Society

A recent story about a fight between two civilians with tazers seemed to mirror my own private predictions about what would happen if society ever got a real stun gun.

The ‘tazer’ isn’t it.  It’s the electrical equivalent of a baton round; it hurts like blazes and you fall down.  If you have a heart condition or the person responsible is enjoying himself too much, maybe you don’t get up again.  A real stun gun — real as in fictional, since that was where the things were originally described — wouldn’t hurt: you’d just collapse in a heap and get up again fifteen minutes later.

Dolphins to the Stars

From World of Ptavvs by Larry Niven:

“I’ll be damned in writing,” said Garner.  “Charley, is this is a new idea?  I’ve never heard of a dolphin wanting to go starhopping.”

“Not … brand new. The question has been discussed on the abstract level, and many are in favour of it, if only from the fear that swimmers will be left out of something.  But I, myself, never felt the urge until three days ago.”